An Ethics of Sexual Difference

by Luce Irigaray, Carolyn Burke (Translator), Gillian Gill (Translator)

"Who or what the other is, I never know. But the other who is forever unknowable is the one who differs from me sexually. This feeling of surprise, astonishment, and wonder in the face of the unknowable ought to be returned to its locus: that of sexual difference." Thus Luce Irigaray undertakes a searching inquiry into what may be the philosophical problem of our age.

Irigaray approaches the question of sexual difference by looking at the ways in which thought and language--whether in philosophy, science, or psychoanalysis--are gendered. She juxtaposes evocative readings of classic texts, including Plato's Symposium, Aristotle's Physics, Descartes's "On Wonder" in The Passions of the Soul, Spinoza's Ethics, Merleau-Ponty's The Visible and the Invisible, and Levinas's Totality and Infinity, with meditations on experiences of love: between fetus and mother, between heterosexual lovers, between women, and between women and their own bodies.

Exploding traditional dualities such as inside/outside, form/content, subject/object, and self/other, Irigaray shows how an understanding of such experiences points to gender blindness in both classic and contemporary theory. Asserting that women have never known a love of self out of which a non-dominated love of the other is possible, Irigaray argues that only when women insist on the integrity of their own spaces of embodiment can love become the basis of a revolution in ethics.

Published in French in 1984, An Ethics of Sexual Difference is now available in English in a superb translation by Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill. Readers interested in feminist theory, literary theory, and philosophy--indeed anyone deeply concerned with gender relations--will be challenged by the brilliance and boldness of Irigaray's analyses.

Genres: Philosophy, Feminism, Nonfiction, Gender, Theory, Psychoanalysis, Academic

232 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1984

About the author

Luce Irigaray is a Belgian-born French feminist, philosopher, linguist, psycholinguist, psychoanalyst and cultural theorist. She is best known for her works Speculum of the Other Woman and This Sex Which Is Not One. Presently, she is active in the Women's Movements in both France and Italy.

Reviews

[Ioana Fotache · Rating 5 out of 5]

Is it weird if I found this kind of hot?

[Amy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book taught me a great deal about myself and how the feminist movement has informed my interactions in ways I hadn't analyzed before. Overall, its incredibly readable. Irigaray has a lucid writing style and usually explains the context in which she is writing with calculated accuracy.

[Alana · Rating 5 out of 5]

This one time in the 80s, Luce Irigaray said, and believe me this is a direct quote, “God impregnated a woman via an angel, but cheeks was still getting clapped.”

This is the fecundity of the caress at the threshold, the embodiment of the intersubjective interval in which communion between two is possible, manifesting itself outside language and in total spite of reason’s hegemony.

I hope she lives forever, cause at this critical and exasperated juncture bent on modes of survival, I really need her to.

And yet, the flesh still stages its revolt against despair. In this barren and desolate terrain, the body will insist on its own mischief.

Ununiversalising the Word, I step closer towards myself, hesitatingly looking for the self’s skewed invention. Whereby I become again and again. Encompass to be done with the re-curse-ive linearity of the temporal, the stranglehold of the Word. You see, the universal and the unchanging are hardly working out. They know nothing of the body or gym membership. Solipsistic survival within the autarchy of the supposedly unified subject of and in language rejects me as I am. Let there be silence once more in my flesh so that I may listen to what is else, rose petal mucous membranes and etc etc.

[Dr. Sionainn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Irigaray had me in the first half, I'm not going to lie. The first half of this book is interesting, albeit dense. However, the second half is devastating and breathtaking.

[Diana · Rating 5 out of 5]

My gender theory hero - thought-provoking (if sometimes frustrating to read) ideas and theories. Her work is the theoretical foundation for all my research.

[Ashley Y · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’m marking this book done, even though, I must admit that I stopped around page 160 and didn’t read the final 50 pages. I tried my hardest because I have a phobia of unfinished books, but I’m not sure if I enjoyed this book at all :( it was too philosophical and theoretical, and to be honest, it was just garbles of words and 1960s Italian feminist thought, which was good to know as a framework but so, so incredibly difficult to get through. It would take me probably 45 minutes to understand 10 pages, and I always needed to be fresh-minded and caffeinated just to discover it didn’t make sense because it actually just doesn’t make sense. So I kind of started skimming or target reading. I think it’s really interesting she takes a gender/alternative approach to famous philosophers such as Aristotle, Plato, Kant, etc. who I was exposed to from the Contemporary Civilizations syllabus. But on the whole, I disliked this. I read it for my senior thesis, and Elena Ferrante cites her/uses her theories endlessly, so I’m glad I read this. However, I learned more watching a 30 minute YouTube video on this book (since I’m too dumb to understand) than actually spending probably 20-odd hours trying to figure this shit out.

[Abigail Munson · Rating 5 out of 5]

<3 this summer I will be exclusively reading Irigaray absolutely destroying the entire western cannon of philosophy written through the masculine subjective

[Marcel Guthier · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have to commit: I read this book in German. I don't get along with her writing on the sexual differences; it's obsolete in our time. But I think as a historic piece, it's awesome to see what happend in the last 40 years in Gender Theory!

And you still can find new insights, for example her own understanding of the dialectic of society, and the male voice as the hegemonial episteme, and how it still influence the modern world.

[David Haws · Rating 4 out of 5]

The language is a little thick, in the academic-obscurant tradition of Wittgenstein/Merleau-Ponty, but there’s a lot here to consider—more than enough to overwhelm the few hours I was able to give it. I accept as a first principle the Kantian notion that differences between men and women, while important, are morally insignificant. Still, Irigaray brings compelling images to the discussion.

[Mariam Rawwas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Irigaray continues her project of attempting to reconcile her feminist commitments to the practice of heterosexuality, interrogating sexual difference as it bears on our relation to spatial configurations, the topology of anatomy, the "mechanics of fluids".

[Tynan Brooks]

I missed continental philosophy. The importance of recognizing and fostering difference as such, and not as a sublimated mode of the masculine norm, is a key takeaway. There's a lot more in here to chew on, though.

[koshka siniaia · Rating 4 out of 5]

can’t say i fully understand it, can’t say i agree with what i understand. but i definitely feel it

[Noah Coates · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really do love Irigaray.

[Liv]

I didn't need to wonder long, however I used this book to write half a page for my master paper...

[Alex Prong · Rating 1 out of 5]

Not enough discussion of mucous

[Dr. A · Rating 5 out of 5]

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Read this and reviews of other classics in Western Philosophy on the History page of www.BestPhilosophyBooks.org (a thinkPhilosophy Production).
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According to Luce Irigaray in An Ethics of Sexual Difference, each age has a philosophical question to work out, and sexual difference is the question for our age, the first difference on which other kinds of differences (such as race/ethnicity and class) are modeled, according to Irigaray.

Irigaray examines the way that sexual difference is treated in the history of western philosophy, science, and psychoanalysis, arguing that any true difference has been obliterated and replaced with a false sexual difference, one according to which the concept of woman is simply the opposite, negation of the concept of man.

What is unique about Irigaray’s argument is that she is not making a political, economic, or social science argument, but a metaphysical one: in order to truly lay down the foundations for thinking difference (and for feminism), we must go back to ancient conceptions of space (and time) that are at root of the falsification of sexual difference. It is not a very intuitive argument, but Irigaray makes a rather good case for this approach.

An Ethics of Sexual Difference is a collection of essays, each of which take up a new thinking from ancient to modern times, and it is written in a style that is quite unique to Irigaray. Influenced by psychoanalysis, Irigaray gives us a diagnostic reading of the western tradition; she does not give us arguments in a traditional, linear fashion but, as many of this generation of thinkers, experiments with language and with the written form, pushing language to say what it has been forbidden.

Like Helene Cixous and Julia Kristeva (with whom she was associated early on as three “French Feminists” though none are native French women), and like Deleuze and Derrida, reading Irigaray is an encounter at the margins of meaning. Irigaray’s Ethics is a fascinating and quite compelling work, and one of the most original works not only in feminism, but in contemporary philosophy.

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Read this and reviews of other classics in Western Philosophy on the History page of www.BestPhilosophyBooks.org (a thinkPhilosophy Production).
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[Leah · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my favorites from Irigaray. This book marks her attempt to bring her philosophy to a much broader audience and is in-between Speculum and Je, Tu, Nous. I especially love her engagement with Descartes' notion of wonder and her idea of male nostalgia.

[Elijah · Rating 1 out of 5]

if only luce left the second wave... what a shame.

[Rachel McCready-Flora · Rating 2 out of 5]

I cannot get past hideous psychoanalysis. Maybe I'll try you again in a few years Irigaray when I have a little more patience.

[Véronique]

féministe, la plussss plusssss